This game is brilliantly crafted, the mountaintop of Interactive Fiction. I found it to be very difficult and time consuming. I’ve considered myself to be fairly adept at Interactive fiction, but I eventually had to resort to walkthroughs, as I had run out of personal time (and energy) to play this.
The play is fair, creative, forgiving and well written. The alchemical aspect, as well as the unique time-space malleability make for a world with almost an almost dizzying array of options, and a dimension of problem solving (layers of cascading dependencies) I hadn’t encountered before.
If you are a beginner at Interactive fiction, or (like me) you enjoy a casual puzzler now and then, you may want to skip this for now, and save this title for later. But DO PLAY it when you can dedicate a level of time, concentration and dedication that a master puzzle requires.